


Open Invitation

by Grenegome



Category: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Kink Meme, M/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-29
Updated: 2012-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-30 07:44:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/329430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grenegome/pseuds/Grenegome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry and John finally get their acts together. Hendricks has no idea how he feels about this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Open Invitation

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Dresden Files Kink Meme.

I’ve seen John Marcone in all sorts of conditions. Buttoned up and buttoned down; fatigues, tuxes, jeans. I’ve seen him fight through gang wars, hold court from his office chair and sleep in the backseat of my car. I’ve seen him naked and not thought much of it, because it was all locker room stuff to me, the in-between scenes when we were gearing up for a public appearance or clearing up after a private one.

I’d never seen him fucking.

Not until Dresden. Not until he met the wizard and went that particular brand of crazy that only John Marcone can maintain and still function. The kind of crazy that stuck with him for years, perched on his shoulder and driving him on towards his goal with single minded intensity. That capacity for willfully blinkered focus is the reason the city has one boss of bosses, the tightest most orderly mob in the country. It’s also one of the reasons Marcone has me; sanity checks are part of my job. When he thinks the kinds of thoughts the rest of the world would flinch from, sometimes he runs them by me first.

But some of his insanity I can’t check, and Marcone spent a good few years being a freak over Dresden, setting up contingency plans to plant a bullet through the guy’s brain even while turning the flirting up to eleven every time they met. That was a new one, actually, seeing him flirt. He’s a pretty private guy about the stuff that matters, and it was unnerving to see him bare so much to Dresden. It’s much easier for Marcone to play at being a monster to do the job that he does, and maybe he believes his own act, but I don’t. I know what distinguishes him from the soulless shits in our business, and it’s not something he can afford to lose. So it freaked me out, every time he let his guard down around Dresden, all the secret human aspects of himself he guarded so carefully exposed to a man who had no idea of the kind of damage he could do to Marcone, to the city, by stomping all over them.

So maybe I freaked out, just a little, when they finally hooked up. I hadn’t seen it coming. And I had to find out from _Gard_.

“He finally tripped the wizard into bed,” she said, leaning against my desk casually. As ‘good morning’s went, it was pretty unconventional. My fingers stuttered on the keyboard, and I marred an already stilted paragraph with a spasm of punctuation; clearly a sign I needed to abandon this chapter and revisit it in the redraft. Gard kept talking as I stared. “About time too. I hear Dresden broadened his horizons since Mab took him at the table.”

Yeah, and hadn’t that been an interesting report to summarise? “Right,” I managed, a little less eloquent than I could have hoped. “One night stand?”

“Hel, I hope not. I don’t think I could tolerate the drama.”

I picked up the mug of lukewarm tea I’d forgotten about and sipped at it slowly. Drama, yes, but Gard wouldn’t get the brunt of it. She must have read my thoughts in my face, because she slugged me on the shoulder companionably. I listed in my chair before righting myself. “Cheer up, _Rauðr_ ,” she said. “He’s having a good morning. ETA five minutes, the secretary got her claws into him at the front door.”

I looked over to John’s desk and, lucky for me, he hadn’t signed off on the post-release forms piling up in his in-tray. It was one thing to have a methodical nature, quite another to develop a love of paperwork. John never had, and he was pretty skilled at finding other pressing business when it was staring him in the face. It guaranteed us at least five minutes of secretarial wrath every other week, and I made sure it was channelled in the right direction. This week, it gave me a little breathing room to get my game face on. “You in today?” I asked Gard.

“I think so. Cleared the fieldwork I was assigned last night. Just writing it up today, unless something more interesting happens.” I knew, from her expression and from previous discussion, that she’d take ‘interesting’ over report writing any day. Gard didn’t seem to understand how John could have both a hatred for paperwork and a fetish for documenting everything. I’d spent time wondering how things worked at Monoc, whether they clung to the remnants of an oral tradition, proclamations of their experiences loud and memorable when they reported in.

Gard tapped me on the shoulder, realising she’d lost my attention. “They’ve sabotaged my computer again,” she said. “Can I call on you if I get stuck?”

“It’s Windows 7, not sabotage. Companies generally update their operating systems every five years or so.”

“The modern confusion between change and improvement is one I shall never understand,” she complained, moving to her desk opposite my own.

“I’ll talk you through anything that’s been too drastically improved,” I promised. Sure, we had IT guys, but they got stupid and non-verbal around Gard, staring in wide eyed determination at the monitor and at her face and being very, very careful not to look anywhere else.

“My champion,” she said, with a broad flash of teeth and amused blue eyes, and I grinned at her. She did a good job at lifting me out of Marcone-centric introspection when necessary. And speak of the devil...

“Good morning Gard, Hendricks,” Marcone said, voice low and pleasant. He looked relaxed; there was no tension in the line of his shoulders, eyes uncharacteristically warm, hands... hands in his goddamn pockets, like he was incognito in jeans instead of the Gentleman in his business best.

Not a one night stand then. Thank fuck. I grunted a response at Marcone, pretending to be deeply involved in the lost cause that was my poor, overly punctuated excuse for a fourth chapter. Gard wasn’t so reticent. “You’ve got foundation on your collar,” she pointed out. “Didn’t figure Dresden for a biter.”

Oh, God. I typed a nonsense string of letters into the waiting document. A biter? Dresden had marked him?

“Mmm. Thank you, Ms Gard. Can you recommend a better method of concealment?”

“Nothing in my bag of tricks,” she said, and then, amusement wicked in her tone, “Hendricks?”

I looked up, startled, and met John’s gaze. I looked away, tongue-tied.

“Mr Hendricks?” John said, professionalism creeping back in at the corners. “Is there something we should discuss?”

“No,” I croaked out, and then coughed, completely failing to convince him. But John didn’t push, just raised his eyebrows and moved to his own desk. I got an email five seconds later:

_Well? The guy thing? The Knight thing? Or the Dresden thing?_

Great. Just the discussion I wanted to be having, but at least he wasn’t making me say it aloud. This was easier on the screen.

_None of the above_ , I replied. _You just took me by surprise_. And then, in a moment of deranged curiosity, I found myself typing, _Good evening?_ and hitting send. I stared at my monitor in horror. What the fuck? What the fucking fuck? Why would I ever want to know that?

Marcone’s reply punctuated my shock: _Worth the wait, certainly._

Great. Good for him. Was I obligated to reply now? If I asked him to kiss and tell, was I supposed to follow him up for the details?

Across from me, Gard’s insistent mouse clicking had reached a frantic crescendo, and she was leaning close to the screen, attempting to glower it into submission. “It’s not being cooperative,” she said, and I stood up abruptly, shoving my chair back from my desk with unintended force. I wasn’t usually clumsy like that, but it was best to interfere before Gard got impatient and started a blood feud with Microsoft.

 

I wasn’t avoiding Marcone. It wasn’t like I _could_ avoid him, when so much of my schedule involved standing behind him and looking intimidating. But maybe I was being less communicative than usual. Not that we traded many words in public, but I’d also muted our speaking glances and body semaphore. Not intentionally. But I felt like I had when I’d knocked the chair backwards; too big, too clumsy, not entirely sure what I wanted to say to him, or how I wanted to say it.

I could see the radio silence was bothering Marcone. We were busy busy busy, same as usual, and it wasn’t interfering with the work, so he let it slide. For now. But I knew he’d pencilled it at the bottom of a mental to-do list. A low priority, but a priority nevertheless. It’d come up eventually.

 

It came up in the car, when Marcone slid into the passenger seat instead of the back, as befits a businessman. I took a deep breath and took us out of park, merging into Chicago traffic. I had John Marcone’s calculating gaze boring into the side of my face, his expectant silence in my ears.

“You trying to make me crash?” I asked, aiming for sarcastic and hitting defensive instead. Shitty opening salvo, self. Try harder.

“I’m trying to figure out what’s going on inside that book filled brain of yours,” he said. “Did I offend you, somehow?”

“Nah,” I said, overtaking someone with a little more aggression than was strictly necessary. “We don’t have a problem.” We didn’t, but maybe _I_ did. Except I didn’t have a fucking clue what it was. I just knew I got all... squirrelly when I thought about Dresden, and the boss. The boss with Dresden. I took a second deep breath, heat flooding into my cheeks and wow, I really couldn’t be handling this discussion any worse.

“Men of your complexion shouldn’t blush,” Marcone said. “You look like a tomato.”

“Fuck off,” I said, but I said it grinning, because John was being a dick, and that was a sign of affection, from him. There weren’t many people he could afford to be casually rude to, not when his every word was weighed down with power and influence.

John smiled, settling in his seat and looking out at the city. “I thought, perhaps, you were jealous of Harry.”

_That’s_ when we nearly crashed. I ignored the chorus of horns and turned to look at him in sheer panicked disbelief.

“Not like that,” his grin was sharp, feline. “I’m well aware our tastes... differ, in that arena.”

“Like what then?” I asked, perception blunted by dumb adrenaline.

“You aren’t used to me trusting people that aren’t you. Confiding in them.” John tilted his head. “I thought you might be feeling... undervalued.”

“I’m not.” I said. “Undervalued. And if you even _think_ about making up with me, Johnny, I’ll hurt you.”

He grinned again. “Promises, promises.” I blushed harder, and maybe I should’ve just crashed the goddamn car into a handy SUV to save myself the humiliation of this conversation. But Marcone decided to behave himself, folding his amusement away for later and pulling out a Blackberry.

Maybe Marcone had a point. Not a very sharp one, but a point nevertheless. A lot of who I was existed in relationship to John Marcone. And he cared deeply and dangerously about a whole host of things, but people... On a personal level, rather than a feudal one, he cared for very few. He cared for me. He respected Gard, but acknowledged her first priority was Monoc. And he cared for Dresden.

It shouldn’t change anything. He’d cared for Dresden for years, in a deeply fucked up, strangely expressed manner. There was no reason for it to spook me now. Just because things had taken a turn for the physical, and more often than not Marcone had that warm, self satisfied expression on his face in private moments, the kind I’d never managed to put there. Fraternal loyalty only takes you so far. Confirming the humanity in a man... well, apparently that was something John Marcone took to more easily with a lover. So maybe there were some dumb eddies of jealously rippling through me. Maybe.

Gard wasn’t a very appreciative spectator to my internal crises, and she kept laying into me every time we were unsupervised in the office. “You’re being ridiculous,” she said, looking up from the chain of paperclips she’d spent the last five minutes linking together. “A man doesn’t _mope_ , Hendricks, not a man like you.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m re-evaluating my relationship with my- ” friend, employer, lord, “Marcone. And the myth that men aren’t subject to emotional responses and that those responses aren’t worth exploring is a harmful one.”

She flicked a paperclip at me with narrowed eyes and scored a perfect hit right over my heart. “Mope, mope, mope. Join them, if it will clear your head.”

I set my tea down carefully. “You’re suggesting- ”

“That you take a tumble with them, yes. Dresden’s striking enough, if you like that sort of thing, and Marcone’s more than enough to make up for him if you don’t.”

“You just got signed up for a sensitivity in the workplace seminar,” I said, writing out a vindictive little post-it note to remind me. But I was still stupid enough to respond to her argument: “I don’t like him that way. Men don’t interest me.”

Gard grinned. “John Marcone and Harry Dresden don’t interest you. They are, and I say this with some authority, the most interesting mortals alive in this era.”

Monoc were pretty hot on the topic of destiny. John wasn’t. Neither was Dresden. But you had to be dull to pretty much everything not to feel the world reorder itself around the pair of them.

“Fine.” I begrudged. “They’re fucking fascinating. Doesn’t mean I want to sleep with either of them.”

“Pity,” came Dresden’s voice as he strolled into the office. He made a beeline for John’s desk, swinging his tatty trainers up onto the paperwork, all eight miles of leg stretched out in front of him. “Bet you and John would make a pretty good tag team, all that silent, intent communication you’ve got going on.”

Fuck.

“Out,” I growled, because Marcone was on a conference call and we had fucking waiting rooms for wizards that turned up early for their dinner dates.

“Or what?” Dresden grinned at me, because he loved being obnoxious and maybe Mab wasn’t letting him practice often.

“Or I switch your fucking dinner reservations to a sushi bar.”

Dresden raised his eyebrows. “Touche.” He stood, but instead of leaving, came to hover near my chair, ducking down to murmur, “Invitation’s open if you change your mind, big guy.” And then he sauntered out.

_Had his horizons broadened_ , Gard said. Right. And then some.

I looked over at her in a _did that really just happen_? kind of way. She shrugged. “Of the three of us, you’re the only one that hasn’t at least kissed him. Mortal life is short, take pleasure where you can.”

“Hedonists, the lot of you,” I ground out. I was never going to finish chapter four.

 

I didn’t mean to interrupt, when I opened the door. We were staying at the mansion, as we did every now and again, usually when John was particularly concerned about looking respectable. There hadn’t been any notification from security that Dresden was on the property, but since he’d been knighted, he’d gotten really good at sneaking in and out of places unnoticed. So I had no way of knowing what I’d see when I stepped into the formal living room. I’d expected John, on his laptop maybe. Instead I saw Dresden’s back as he knelt on the floor at John’s feet, and John, sitting on the sofa, head thrown back, eyes closed, rising colour creeping across his face, sneaking down past his collar. They were both still fully clothed, had apparently paused for just long enough for John to lower his fly and grab a fist full of Dresden’s hair.

There wasn’t much on show, just Dresden’s bobbing head, his wet, satisfied noises, and John’s look of silent rapture. But it cut straight through me.

I froze in the doorway, totally lacking the sense to jerk back and close the door, just staring, silently.

It didn’t disgust me. I was old enough, smart enough, to have schooled myself out of some of the pointless prejudices of my youth, but still, I’d always shied away from thoughts of Marcone, like this, with men. I’d worried that some stupid, fossilised fear would rear its macho head, that I might not be wise enough to overcome it. And I couldn’t cope with that, with my own stupidity looming between me and John Marcone.

But I wasn’t disgusted. Maybe that should have relieved me, but I’d travelled straight past relief and into fascination, gaze fixed on John’s bitten lower lip, his white knuckled grip. And the happy, hungry noises punctuating Dresden’s shameless abandon.

John opened his eyes.

He looked straight at me, and didn’t have the grace to fake surprise. Instead, a lazy smile made itself known as he met my eyes, something full of pride and pleasure. He wasn't in any hurry to finish up, to try and hide this from me. Instead he eased his grip on Dresden’s hair. “Easy does it, Harry. We’ve got all night.”

Dresden hummed his agreement and pulled off, “Sure we have. You’re the one who couldn’t wait for a bedroom.” And then he dipped his head, licked John right from his balls to the tip of his cock, before swallowing him down slow, like he was savouring the taste.

I bit my own lip and Marcone kept looking at me, intoxicated amusement fresh in his eyes, something like challenge standing behind it. Fuck fuck fuck.

Men with my complexion shouldn’t blush, right, but I knew I was right then. Scarlet from the roots of my hair on down. I couldn’t... I couldn’t watch this. Open invitation or not, Dresden didn’t know he was on show. The fact that my libido was taking an unprecedented interest in events needed addressing, certainly, but maybe in the privacy of my own head, at my own pace. Not by instinctively stepping up to the challenge in Marcone’s eyes. He arched a brow and I shook my head at him once, sharply.

He shook his head back, slowly, smile shading into rueful.Then he shooed me away with the hand that wasn’t petting Dresden’s head; I was welcome to play along, but not spectate. I was fine with that.

I was careful when I eased the door shut behind me. There are few things Marcone wouldn’t forgive me for, but I think startling a spell-happy combat wizard with his mouth on Marcone’s cock might be one of them. I leaned against the wall of the hallway after I’d returned them to their privacy. I could still make out Dresden’s eager moans, if I held my breath. My treacherous hand crept down the front of my slacks, pressing against the incriminating bulge that stopped me pushing this entire crazy interlude to the back of my mind. I hadn’t seen this coming.

I grit my teeth and eased my hand away, leaving myself aching for want of touch. _This_ didn’t count as a better place to get to grips with myself. I took a deep centering breath and slipped out of my suit jacket, draping it over my arm and conveniently concealing all evidence of my agitation. Good, great. I could make my way to my room without making an exhibition of myself.

And then... then I was going to have a good hard think about what the hell was going on with me.


End file.
